Suit filed on behalf of Haitian woman killed in Turnpike crash, cites Supreme Court

Haiti admin June 11, 2026 0 Comments

Suit filed on behalf of Haitian woman killed in Turnpike crash, cites Supreme Court

Every day for the past 10 months, Angeline Daudin has waited for the telephone to ring so she could hear her mothers’ voice.

That was their routine during their years of separation, Daudin said, as she attended school in the Dominican Republic and her mother, Faniola Joseph, lived first in Brazil after fleeing Haiti, and later in Indiana to support her.

“She called me every day,” Daudin, 22, said, describing her mother as her “everything.”

“She was the only one who did everything for me — paid for my studies, took care of me —and now she’s dead, leaving me all alone,” the university student said through tears. “The loss of my mom is the worst thing God could have done to me. I’ve lost all hope.”

Joseph, 38, was among three Haitian immigrants killed on Aug. 12 in an accident on Florida’s Turnpike when the minivan she and two others were traveling in was struck by a 53-foot tractor-trailer.

Authorities said the truck driver, Harjinder Singh, an undocumented immigrant with a Class A California commercial driver’s license, was attempting an illegal U-turn at an “official use only” area of the Turnpike about 19 miles north of Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County when the minivan collided with the trailer and became lodged underneath it.

Singh, the suit says, “completely blocked all northbound travel lanes of Florida’s Turnpike at Mile Marker 171, creating an unavoidable barrier for approaching northbound traffic.”

Joseph was seated in the rear of the vehicle. The driver, Herby Dufresne, 30, and front-seat passenger Rodrigue Dor, 54, were also killed.

The fatal collision shocked South Florida’s Haitian community and quickly entered the national debate over immigration and commercial truck driver licenses because of Singh’s undocumented status and questions about his English proficiency.

On Thursday, Miami attorney Dax Bello filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in St. Lucie County on behalf of Joseph’s estate, represented by Yaniel Cantelar. The suit seeks damages in excess of $75,000 under Florida’s Wrongful Death Act.

He is suing Singh, who is charged with three counts of vehicular homicide, along with his employer, White Hawk Carriers, the manager who hired him and freight broker C. H. Robinson. The complaint relies in part on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows state-law negligence claims against freight brokers over their selection of motor carriers. The Herald sent an email to C.H. Robinson seeking comment but had not received a reply by the time of publication.

Bellos said a chain of “cascading failures” led to Joseph’s death.

.“A mother is gone because, as we allege, a series of companies put profit ahead of safety,” Bello said. “An unqualified driver never should have been at the wheel of an 80,000-pound truck, the carrier never should have hired and dispatched him, and the broker never should have handed this load to a carrier like that.”

Supreme Court ruling opens door

The litigation is among the first wrongful-death suits in Florida to invoke the U.S. Supreme Court’s new broker-liability ruling, which allows injured families to hold brokers accountable following catastrophic trucking accidents.

In a unanimous decision on May 14, 2026, the court concluded that federal law doesn’t shield freight brokers from state-law claims.

“For a long time, these claims against brokers were not possible,” Bello said. “The Supreme Court understood exactly what negligent selection claims against brokers are about.

‘Not all truck accidents can be prevented. But some can. Some carriers are known to be less safe; some truck drivers are known to be unfit,” he added, quoting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion. “Freight brokers decide which motor carriers get put on the road. The moment they know they can be held accountable for choosing an unfit one, they’ll stop handing loads to dangerous carriers just to save a buck, and those carriers will go out of business.”

Daudin said she didn’t learn of her mother’s death until three days later. After sending multiple unanswered text messages, she heard from her stepfather, who delivered the tragic news. “I dropped my phone and went running. I was crazy,” she said. “Before my mom died she called me and couldn’t get me. She left a voice message for me…. It was her final words.”

Joseph’s funeral took place in a South Miami-Dade church, along with Dufresne’s. It was organized with help from the local Haitian consulate, and funded in part by Sikhs for Justice, which had pledged $100,000. Both were buried at Palms Woodlawn Cemetery in Naranja.

Daudin wasn’t able to attend her mother’s funeral and had to watch the service on YouTube. She wasn’t able to see her mother’s face, she said, because she had been badly disfigured.

“I would like one day to be able to go see where she is buried and to place a flower at her grave,” she said.

Bello said Singh, an Indian-born Sikh, “did something flatly illegal,“ while the motor carrier should have never put him behind the wheel. C.H. Robinson, as one of the nation’s largest freight brokers, also should have known better, he said.

“If a company that size is going to be handing over the nation’s freight to unsafe carriers like this one, then shame on them,” he said. “We’re going to see them in court.”